Except for the charwoman who plays a starring role in the penultimate scenes, the household help is just part of the furniture of the story, like the cabinet that gets shifted to another room.Įven the main characters tend to appear categorically, named only by their functions: “father,” “mother,” “sister.” Only one of them gets a name, Grete (rhymes with beta), but even she is usually referred to only as “sister” throughout, until the decisive moment near the end when she becomes instead a “daughter.” By defining all these characters through their relationship to Gregor, Kafka slyly allows Gregor’s point of view to dominate the story even when he is not actually present in the scene being described. Early on in the story we see the maid give notice and flee, only to find her still working in the household several pages later and in fact doing all the cooking, since now it is the cook who quit. Kafka is not even particularly attentive to the continuity of his cast of characters. Both are physical correlatives of a life that has gotten out of hand. How many rooms does this apartment have? Many, too many just as Gregor, lying on his back in the story’s opening sentences, discovers he has “these many little legs” waving in the air above him. Although Vladimir Nabokov-with his penchant for exactitude-has mapped out the Samsa flat in some detail, I am far from certain that Kafka himself-with his penchant for the blurred perceptions of bewilderment-was much concerned with the apartment’s precise geography. That same blurred focus applies to other aspects of the story.
In my translation, Gregor is transformed into “some sort of monstrous insect” with “some sort of” added to blur the borders of the somewhat too specific “insect” I think Kafka wanted us to see Gregor’s new body and condition with the same hazy focus with which Gregor himself discovers them. Ungeziefer is also used informally as the equivalent of “bug,” though the connotation is “dirty, nasty bug”-you wouldn’t apply the word to cute, helpful creatures like ladybugs. The word in German suggests primarily six-legged critters, though it otherwise resembles the English word “vermin” (which refers primarily to rodents). Ungeziefer comes from the Middle High German ungezibere, a negation of the Old High German zebar (related to the Old English ti’ber), meaning “sacrifice” or “sacrificial animal.” An ungezibere, then, is an unclean animal unfit for sacrifice, and Ungeziefer describes the class of nasty creepy-crawly things. Both the adjective ungeheuer (meaning “monstrous” or “huge”) and the noun Ungeziefer are negations- virtual nonentities-prefixed by un. The epithet ungeheueres Ungeziefer in the opening sentence poses one of the greatest challenges to the translator. And although he and his friends used the word “bug” ( Wanze) when referring casually to the story, the language that appears in the novella itself is carefully chosen to avoid specificity. What exactly is he transformed into? In Kafka’s correspondence with his publisher, he was adamant that the “insect” ( Insekt) not be depicted on the jacket of the book. He has worked himself to the point of utter exhaustion to pay off his parents’ debts, and his grotesque metamorphosis is the physical manifestation of his abasement. The story’s protagonist, Gregor Samsa, is the quintessential Kafka anti-hero. It came out in October 1915, and then appeared in December 1915 (though dated 1916) as a slender volume published by Kurt Wolff Verlag in Leipzig. In the spring of 1915, René Schickele took over as editor-in-chief of Die weissen Blätter, and with Max Brod’s help, Kafka placed the story there. But months passed before Kafka had a clean manuscript ready for submission, and then World War I intervened, causing further delays (Musil was called up to serve, and because of the war Blei decided to stop printing literary texts). Franz Blei, the literary editor of the new avant-garde journal Die weissen Blätter, expressed interest, and Robert Musil wrote as well, soliciting the novella for the more established Die neue Rundschau. People started talking about it, and Kafka received a query from publisher Kurt Wolff in March 1913 on the recommendation of Kafka’s friend Franz Werfel.
As we know from Max Brod’s diary, Kafka read the first section of his “bug piece” ( Wanzensache) aloud to friends on November 24, 1912, and again on December 15.
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